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The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 25 Sep 2017 15:05:19 +0000en-UShourly1Can SMS be a surrogate for the internet in the developing world?https://gigaom.com/2013/11/23/can-sms-be-a-surrogate-for-the-internet-in-the-developing-world/
https://gigaom.com/2013/11/23/can-sms-be-a-surrogate-for-the-internet-in-the-developing-world/#commentsSat, 23 Nov 2013 16:00:22 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=718288Unconvinced as to the power of SMS? Well, in an instant, mobile messaging company Mobile Accord could send a mass text message that could reach people in 205 countries, said president Steve Gutterman — the only exception is North Korea.

In places where there is no fiber or landlines of any sort, no access to internet, PCs or even wireline phones, there are still mobile phones and they’re all capable of sending and receiving the lowly SMS message. That’s a very powerful tool that can be used for research, commerce, banking, even economic development.

Mobile Accord, the Denver-based company behind SMS-charitable giving organization mGive, has launched a new venture called GeoPoll, which aims to use SMS to research the tastes and opinions of billions of people unreachable through other communications channels. GeoPoll performs these surveys for the benefit of non-profits, international organizations like the U.N., and commercial businesses alike. It integrates with the billing systems of global carriers and it compensates its participants with airtime credits (which in many countries in the developing world can be used as a currency).

GeoPoll also recently raised a $6.6 million Series A funding round from private investors, bringing its total funding to $11.6 million. According to Gutterman, GeoPoll will use those funds to reach out to more survey participants, increasing its reach from 50 million today to 500 million by the end of 2014.

GeoPoll’s surveys don’t require an app, a mobile browser or even an internet connection (though it can do internet polls with participants with more sophisticated phones). Mostly it uses the SMS channel to collect data, and in areas of low literacy it can conduct the surveys via voice prompt. The company has conducted polls ranging from what brand of toothpaste people use to the quality of infrastructure in remote villages to the affects the ravages of war can have on a people.

The company’s first poll surveyed 4 million people in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. This video created for the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report shows the kind of information GeoPoll can collect:

And though GeoPoll pays participants for most surveys, Gutterman has discovered participation levels — generally greater than 50 percent — are just as high on polls with no compensation. “We’ve found giving people a voice where they had none before is really compelling,” he said. “People want to complete our polls.”

That might sound odd to you and me, as we’re digitally barraged by marketers, but Gutterman explained that in the places where his company polls, people don’t often get the chance to participate in broader forums beyond their local communities. It helps that many of GeoPoll’s surveys have been about meaningful issues such as economic development and social justice.

Participating in SMS polls is still a far cry from full access to the internet, but a lot of other companies have taken to SMS to recreate services that would normally be available through a browser. Safaricom and Vodacom have built vast financial networks in Africa with M-Pesa, which uses SMS to process and confirm payments and peer-to-peer transactions.

A company called Jana explored the idea of using SMS as a means of outsourcing simple projects to the developing world such as the translation of sentences — think of Mechanical Turk but with each assignment divided into hundreds of smaller tasks. Jana eventually dropped that program, and is now focusing on surveys and marketing campaigns much like GeoPoll. But the potential remains for using short messages not only as a means of trafficking in more than just personal communications.

Before we had smartphones, we in the developed world were much more dependent on SMS as a means of accessing and transmitting data. We used it to vote for our favorite reality TV performers, to request show times for movies and to get score updates on our favorite sports teams. We still use SMS today to augment what are primarily online and mobile internet services, such as banking and social networks.

But if you divorce SMS from the internet entirely, it still remains a very powerful informational tool. And a lot of people are figuring out ways to use SMS to bridge the gap between the connected world and the so-called unconnected world.

Corrected Tuesday 4 p.m. PT. A week after a massive earthquake struck Haiti, the country’s terrible devastation continues to captivate and motivate onlookers — and one of the simplest and best-publicized ways to help is to send a $5 or $10 donation through a text message. Combined, the two major mobile giving platforms, mGive and the Mobile Giving Foundation, have raised $42 $27 million via text message commitments from Americans and Canadians. Initially, as we reported, those mobile donations faced 90-day delays to reach Haiti, based on the emergent industry’s practices of billing subscribers via their carriers during their normal payment cycle.

However now the four major American carriers have all committed to making an exception, passing the donations on to Haiti more quickly. Verizon (s vz) kicked it off with $2.98 million sent to Haiti on Friday (the total of its customers’ mobile giving at that time). Sprint (s s) said, also on Friday, it would send 80 percent of the $1.2 million its customers had donated to Haiti immediately, with the rest to follow. T-Mobile said Monday on a customer support forum that it aimed to get funds to Haiti by “this week.” And a spokesperson for AT&T (s t) told us via email, “Yes, we will advance payment of verified texted donations to the Red Cross for Haiti relief as soon as possible.” He said AT&T customers had pledged more than $9 million to the Red Cross via text as of Monday afternoon.

Carriers are also waiving text message fees for the Haiti donation process, in which a user texts a keyword like “Haiti” or “quake” to a short code, then receives a response, confirms the donation, and then receives a thank you — for a total of four text messages.

The Mobile Giving Foundation said in a press release that it continues to see the rate of mobile donations rise, with $3.5 million donated on Sunday alone for a total of more than $20 $27 million raised. mGive said separately it is processing more than $10,000 per minute in text donations at peak, and has seen $22 $23 million pledged to the Red Cross (the vast majority of all American mobile donations). The Haiti fundraising effort is easily the largest mobile giving campaign to date.

After the dust settles, the carriers and the mobile giving facilitators will have to establish better processes for mobile fundraising. While it makes complete sense to expedite desperately needed disaster relief funding, there’s a risk of opening the door to money transfer for unverified causes, and pre-authorizing donations on which subscribers then default.

Correction: This article originally treated the amounts raised by the Mobile Giving Foundation and mGive as two separate figures. However, the Mobile Giving Foundation included mGive’s fundraising totals in the numbers it released. We have corrected the story with new numbers, accurate as of Tuesday afternoon.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2010/01/19/carriers-move-to-get-text-donations-to-haiti-faster/feed/6Haiti Text Donation Campaigns Face 90-Day Delayshttps://gigaom.com/2010/01/14/haiti-text-donation-campaigns-face-90-day-delays/
https://gigaom.com/2010/01/14/haiti-text-donation-campaigns-face-90-day-delays/#commentsThu, 14 Jan 2010 19:08:11 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=91486UPDATED: Text-to-give campaigns have gone viral in the two days following the massively destructive 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12. The immediacy of texting makes it incredibly easy for those following the quake from afar to show their support by adding a small amount to their cell phone bills (especially in the U.S., where the two major campaigns are based). But at this point, it’s far from immediate that the $5 you send to Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti foundation or $10 to the American Red Cross actually gets to Haiti, because it’s standard practice in the young mobile giving industry for donations to be delayed by 90 days.

The Red Cross, whose campaign is being publicized by the White House and the U.S. State Department, is accepting $10 donations via texting “Haiti” to 90999 in a program powered by Mobile Accord’s mGive. As of this morning, that campaign alone had raised $3 million (see the map image below for a distribution of donations). The State Department had actually been responsible for initiating the Red Cross campaign with a call to Mobile Accord chairman James Eberhard (who had met Secretary Clinton at a dinner earlier this month, but got the call while traveling in Pakistan this week). It was activated at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday and had raised $800,000 by 3 p.m. Wednesday.

$3 million easily tops mGive’s previous record of $450,000 donated to Alicia Keys’ children foundation, which was publicized through “American Idol.” The Mobile Giving Foundation, which is powering Wyclef’s parallel campaign and has not yet released Haiti totals, said it expected to raise a total of $2 million in all of 2009. Both organizations say neither they nor mobile carriers are taking a cut from the Haiti donations.

However both Mobile Accord (which is a for-profit company, but operates 100 percent pass-through mobile donation campaigns through the mGive Foundation) and the Mobile Giving Foundation admit it usually takes 90 days from the time of donation to the time it is received by the intended charity, in part because they are collected through each customer’s normal cell phone billing cycle. That’s eons in disaster recovery time.

Earlier today mGive posted to Twitter, “We are currently working with the carriers to reduce this window. We will tweet when he have an update on this.” A spokesperson for mGive added via email, “It would be inaccurate to talk about them as ‘carrier’ delays. The delays are just in the business processes that were set up when the mobile giving channel was created. Like all new systems, it will improve as we grow and learn.”

A spokesperson for Verizon (s vz) — which like most carriers is waiving SMS fees for Haiti donations — told DailyFinance, “We understand the need to get this money into the pipeline ASAP and we’re looking at ways to do that internally. People want to give now, and the money needs to get there as soon as possible.”

Sounds like a plan. C’mon carriers — let’s get cracking!

Update: Around noon PT Friday, Verizon Wireless said it had advanced $2.98 million in mobile donations committed by its customers to Haiti. “Time is of the essence, and it makes sense for us to toss aside our normal financial processes to get money where it can do the most good, in the fastest way possible,” said Verizon Wireless president and CEO Lowell McAdam in a statement.

Update 2 (Tuesday, Jan. 19): The four major American carriers now say they are all committed to getting text donations to Haiti quickly.

* Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
* Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
* Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
* Text YELE to 501501 to donation $5 to Yele
* Text RELIEF to 30644 to get automatically connected to Catholic Relief Services and donate money with your credit card
* Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
* Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
* Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International